Dee, Lovecraft, Voynich - An Eternal Triangle?

I've just started reading Colin Wilson's "The Philosopher's Stone", so I thought it might be a good idea to blog about an article from the Metromagick blog where he also plays a role.

The piece is called "Dr. John Dee, the Necronomicon & the Cleansing of the World", and was written by Colin Low in 1996-2000. It's basically an extended riff on H.P.Lovecraft, John Dee, the Voynich Manuscript, Aleister Crowley and the Necronomicon, and how much they do (or don't) relate to each other.

The problem with Lovecraft fans is that they often enjoy emulating what their gloomy hero liked to do: mix fantasy with history until they both blur together into one great big glob of either historicised fiction or fictionalised history (whichever you prefer, it doesn't matter much).

And so it was that in 1978, a book called "Necronomicon" appeared edited by George Hay (reprinted in 1995), containing a claim by David Langford and Robert Turner that Lovecraft's fabled Necronomicon was not only real but "had been preserved by Alkindi in his treatise The Book of the Essence of the Soul", parts of which had in turn been enciphered by John Dee in his Liber Loagaeth. With an introduction by Colin Wilson, it looked convincingly like real historical research... but (as you've probably guessed by now) it was merely faux Lovecraftian nonsense.

Colin Low's article then goes on to collect together various strands apparently connecting Dee (via Enochian and Choronzon) to Crowley and his well-documented adventures with demon summoning. It's all entertaining stuff, but the possible presence at the ball of a Lovecraftian mischief-making poltergeist tends to rather reduce its reliability for the reader. So in the end, does Low's account amount to something special or to something of nothing? Basically, I think you'll have to make your own call.

However, I do find Low's summing-up of the Necronomicon fiercely attuned to much that has been said about the Voynich Manuscript: "The Necronomicon is a hollow vessel - it booms resoundingly, but has nothing in it but the projections of our own fantasies." Which is a shame.

New Byzantium book...

Over the years I've spent looking at the Voynich Manuscript, I've become progressively more accustomed to its ways, to the point that it is no longer an enciphered grimoire to me, but simply a book we cannot as yet read. When learning to juggle, the primary force which keeps the ball in the hand is not gravity but fear: all the while people see the VMs as a dark, Necronomicon-like repository of ancient evil (basically, confusing unreadable with unspeakable), their fears prevent them from grasping what it actually is.

Yet there's still something odd about how the Voynich Manuscript is rooted, upon what it stands: specifically, it seems to my eyes to have one foot in early modern European (specifically Northern Italian, I would say) culture and the other in late medieval Byzantine culture. Though I'm still unable to satisfactorily express how this works, what I can say is that many of its herbal drawings have a structural quality that is neither medieval European (slavishly copied, overstylised, unrealistic) nor Renaissance European (emblematic rather than symbolic, abstract). The closest match I've found is in Byzantine herbals, many of which are drawn from life, but which have a kind of secret inner numericality: not Kabbalah, but topology / geometry.

I'm therefore always on the lookout for good stuff relating to Byzantium, but its 1000-year history is fascinating for many other reasons: the rich seam of inspiration the Romantic poets found in the marvellous decay of Venice was perhaps but a shadow of the irony and wonder to be discovered in Byzantium's own history.

And so a book I'm looking forward to is "Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire" by Judith Herrin (Princeton, 2007), which seems to have exactly the kind of overall historical narrative all the fragments of Byzantine history I've ever read lacked. There's a helpful review here: the hardback's £25 RRP is a little hard to swallow, for sure, but what can you do? (Errrm, wait for the paperback?)

Voynich Manuscript in existing novels...?

From the apparent tsunami of Voynich fiction about to crash down on our literary shores over the next year, it might seem that the VMs had never previously appeared in a novel. Yet this is not exactly true...

For example, "Indiana Jones and the Philosopher's Stone" (Max McCoy, Bantam Books, 1995) is based entirely around the Voynich Manuscript: set in March 1933, a mad scholar called Sarducci has stolen the VMs (which is actually a map), and so Indy chases him through Mussolini's fascist Italy all the way to an amazing alchemical crypt in the desert... From what I've read of this book, it actually seems to be a pleasantly pulpy read, very much in tune with the actual VMs, and with a refreshing lack of power-mad Jesuit priests. However, I should warn you that it will be re-released on 29th April 2008, presumably to try to ride the whole 2008 Voy-niche publishing wave. *sigh*

Another pair of VMs-themed books came to my attention via the Bellairsia blog, which is devoted to books by the writer John Anthony Bellairs. His most famous novel was "The Face in the Frost" (1969), a fantasy novel in which Prospero and Roger Bacon fight against a mysterious grimoire that sounds not at all dissimilar to the VMs. After Bellairs' death in 1991, his estate commissioned author Brad Strickland to complete and continue Bellairs' various series: and it is in one of these that protagonist Johnny Dixon faces "The Wrath of the Grinning Ghost" (1999), which features the VMs in a starring role.

Connections between J.R.R.Tolkien and the VMs have been suggested in the past. According to Voynich mailing list member Anthony, Tolkien did indeed own a copy of at least one page of the VMs, which may have played a small part in influencing his choice of the fantasy scripts in his books. As I recall, there were a number of people in Tolkien's Oxford circle that had an interest in early modern scientific manuscripts, so this does seem a perfectly sensible idea.

Many people have also wondered about the relationship between H.P.Lovecraft's Necronomicon and the Voynich Manuscript: Colin Wilson based a short story called "The Return of the Lloigor" around this, and returned to the theme at the end of his novel "The Philosopher's Stone".

All the same, this modest pile of Voynich fiction looks set to triple in height this year... interesting times!